Want ads, game plugs, etc

Seth, it seems that iDG continues to be a honeypot for composers, artists, devs who want to post their skills, devs who want to plug their game or who want to recruit. Have you considered requiring a fee for that privilege?

You can place that revenue into a site account and use it as a cash prize for future uDG.

For me, I didn't mind when people within our community were posting these types of threads. But I was never keen on the guy/girl who would come here, post, and never come back. If you want to allow them to do so, I say, make it beneficial for this community. Alternatively, set it so those forums can be posted to only after X posts in more technical categories. i.e. Exchange some of your knowledge to help this community for allowing you to post.

I'm also keen to hear the state-of-iDG. What are your plans? uDG backend and frontend were excellent, so many kudos to you. For iDG site, the forum still has traffic, but it seems all the activity related to new content hasn't happened. Or am I not seeing it? lol. I thought more people would be posting tutorials, postmortems and so on once 'that darn Camacho got out of the way.'

(Feb 17, 2012 05:56 AM)Carlos Camacho Wrote: For iDG site, the forum still has traffic, but it seems all the activity related to new content hasn't happened. Or am I not seeing it? lol. I thought more people would be posting tutorials, postmortems and so on once 'that darn Camacho got out of the way.'

Sites like http://idevblogaday.com/ and http://altdevblogaday.com/ seem really popular and manage most of their content by scraping members' own blogs. Those unfortunately get a lot of fluff articles as people rush 'cause it's their "turn". Maybe something similar, but with more curation, could work here?

I admit, I've been slacking off. It all comes down to how much "free time" I have. Other than the occasional day break every other week, I've been working all day every day for months on Araelium, so I haven't had time to do a post-uDG big update for iDG. I'll spare the details, but I've been super busy and nobody has bugged me about it (but myself) so I've let it slide a bit.

There are more sections to the site that need to be added — game announcement postings are one of them. It technically already exists, but it's not turned on because I want to look it over again and probably change a couple things in it. There are fewer game announcement posts in the forums than there were months ago — the restriction on posting in Announcements and the thread deletion in some cases has kinda weeded out the most obvious post-and-runs. I'm still not happy with them being in the forums so much, but it's a time thing.

As far as actual content, I did add a quick /unity3d section a while ago. I'd like to see that section grow with contributions from some of our pro Unity guys. I'm in the processes of getting the latest edition of a good Unity book to review. Alex Sikora is working on another cocos2d book review (we've already had one of a previous book). I'd also like to see a /cocos2d page, a /chipmunk page, GameKit/GLKit/GameCenter section, etc. I'd like to see dedicated sections about major APIs/tools that we use and collect resources for them in those sections.

There's the long wish of having an Assets section - images, textures, sound effects etc. I still haven't written this, but I need to. That'll tie into the Amazon server which I learned how to use during uDG. This will be a few days worth of work, that I just haven't made time for yet. I also think this is the least important thing which is why I haven't started on it.

I have two mostly finished tutorials on getting GL, event handling, and textures setup for Mac games, but they haven't been released because I wanted a more complete set before releasing them. Mountain Lion's new equal footing with iOS 5 with GLKit and all of the other APIs makes me want to tackle tutorials for doing games with iOS 5/10.8+ rather than backwards compatibility. All irrelevant if I don't get around to it. It'd be great if someone here would write something.

One major thing I've been thinking about with content is going around to all of the independent blogs and asking if we could repost their (good) content. There's a lot of useful stuff scattered all over from independent writers, and I think if we could recruit them to post on iDG we'd have something going.

As far as ads go, I hate them. The money could be useful if it wouldn't be so little. The site is cheap to run and I do not mind putting up cash for the right things. With the value of the site as it _currently_ is, I'm not interested in throwing up ads just get a couple hundred bucks a year. That's useless. If all the sections are in place, and content agreements are in place with some independent writers, and traffic boosts by at least 3x, then maybe the ad revenue generated would be enough to actually pay writers, so we could have regular high quality content. That's something I'm eventually interested in, but there are several steps which have to happen before we can slap ads on the site. Until it is, ad free it shall remain.

At any rate, here's my schedule for the next couple months. A *very* long story short, I have three major goals between now and summer. 1) I need to push out a massive Querious update. I've been working on this since early December. 2) I need to finish this new app I've been working on for a few weeks by the end of this month. 3) I need to have a new update for Screenflick ready for 10.8's release to take advantage of some new features in 10.8 which are desperately needed because 10.7's APIs are a piece of crap that made SF's efficiency drop by 10x compared to 10.6 in some cases.

If I can accomplish all 3 of these things by summer as I intend, I will be in a good place. I don't want to spill my personal stuff out on the net, but the Querious update is big and it's absolutely crucial that I get it done as quickly as possible (which is why I need to get this new app done as quickly as possible). After those two things are done, I will be back to a more relaxed schedule and can dedicate a lot more time to iDG than I have been.

(Feb 18, 2012 12:09 PM)Frank C. Wrote: Sites like http://idevblogaday.com/ and http://altdevblogaday.com/ seem really popular and manage most of their content by scraping members' own blogs. Those unfortunately get a lot of fluff articles as people rush 'cause it's their "turn". Maybe something similar, but with more curation, could work here?

Oh I forgot to mention this. I started working on this before iDG, but I never did get around to finishing it properly. That's when I was asking for blogs that you guys read. It was going to scrape and list RSS articles from blogs, but the tricky part of it was going to be determining (probably approving) relevant articles. I still like that idea, but I'm not sure about the legality of reposting content from other top sites. Like, scraping some of Gamasutra's good posts. It's the internet, so everything gets reposted, but a lot of it (Gamasutra for sure) is still copyrighted content, so we'd need explicit agreements in a lot of cases. Which is what lead me to thinking about actually going around and getting explicit agreements.

(Feb 18, 2012 02:26 PM)SethWillits Wrote: I'm not sure about the legality of reposting content from other top sites. Like, scraping some of Gamasutra's good posts. It's the internet, so everything gets reposted, but a lot of it (Gamasutra for sure) is still copyrighted content, so we'd need explicit agreements in a lot of cases. Which is what lead me to thinking about actually going around and getting explicit agreements.

Yeah you'll definitely need permission, but I'd think most developers would be happy to give that so long as you print the source and link back to their sites (like this Gamasutra article does). People blog to get more exposure for their companies and games, so getting stuff reposted on larger sites is a no brainer.

Just chiming in to say I support Seth's plan for organizing his life and doing work for us for free.

I'd help with writing, but I feel like my skills aren't really applicable to "Mac game programming." I just incidentally am able to produce Mac games. I already have a Python tutorial, but it's Python. Everything else I've done has been in some shitty BASIC variant. Now I wrangle Hadoop for a living.

Unity is perfectly welcome. The site isn't only about doing everything from scratch.

As for the general thought of not having skills to write about, it's not like I do a lot of game development and am an expert in it either. I just pick a topic and learn it as best I can, ask others for advice, and write about the conclusions I come to. As long as you do your due diligence, it's good. I have a big list of topics to write about somewhere...